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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

College Gains Reliable Backup and Offsite Replication with ExaGrid System

Customer Overview

Goodwin College, located in East Hartford, Connecticut, is a nonprofit institution of higher education and is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE). Goodwin College was founded in 1999, with the goal of serving a diverse student population with career-focused degree programs that lead to strong employment outcomes.

Key Benefits:

  • ExaGrid has provided the college with ‘reliable’ backup and replication for years
  • ‘Solid’ ExaGrid system needs little maintenance
  • ExaGrid supports and integrates with both of college’s backup applications
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ExaGrid Supports College’s Backup Applications

Goodwin College backs its data up to an ExaGrid system at its primary site that replicates to an offsite ExaGrid system for disaster recovery (DR). “We virtualized most of our environment and we’re using Veeam to back up our VMware, and Veritas Backup Exec to back up our remaining physical machines. They’re both totally different types of backups, so they’re like apples and oranges, but they both integrate well with ExaGrid,” said Randy K. Swanson, the college’s senior system administrator.

“Installation of our systems went really well, especially with the assistance of our ExaGrid support engineer. Our ExaGrid systems have been working without issue since we set up our backup and replication years ago,” he added.

The ExaGrid system is easy to install and use and works seamlessly with the industry’s leading backup applications so that an organization can retain its investment in its existing backup applications and processes. In addition, ExaGrid appliances can replicate to a second ExaGrid appliance at a second site or to the public cloud for DR (disaster recovery).

"We virtualized most of our environment and we’re using Veeam to back up our VMware, and Veritas Backup Exec to back up our remaining physical machines. They’re both totally different types of backups, so they’re like apples and oranges, but they both integrate well with ExaGrid. "

Randy K. Swanson, Senior Systems Administrator

Quick, Reliable Backups

Swanson backs up the college’s data in daily incrementals as well as weekly and monthly fulls. The data consists of everything from CIFS to Exchange servers to VMs. “Our backups are broken down into 50 jobs, and those can range from a few minutes to a few hours, depending on the type of data. Our backups are reliable, with everything working just fine. ExaGrid works as well as its sales team claimed it would, which is great.”

ExaGrid writes backups directly to a disk-cache Landing Zone, avoiding inline processing and ensuring the highest possible backup performance, which results in the shortest backup window. Adaptive Deduplication performs deduplication and replication in parallel with backups for a strong recovery point (RPO). As data is being deduplicated to the repository, it can also be replicated to a second ExaGrid site or the public cloud for disaster recovery (DR).

Support for a ‘Solid’ System

Swanson appreciates how dependable ExaGrid systems are but also knows that ExaGrid support is just a phone call away when he needs it. “I work with an assigned ExaGrid support engineer, and he really understands my environment and gets back to me quickly if I have a question.

“ExaGrid’s hardware is solid. The most maintenance we’ve needed to do is swap out hard drives, which my support engineer sent over quickly, and is something that is expected with any product,” said Swanson.

The ExaGrid system was designed to be easy to set up and operate. ExaGrid’s industry-leading level 2 senior support engineers are assigned to individual customers, ensuring they always work with the same engineer. Customer’s never have to repeat themselves to various support staff, and issues get resolved quickly.

Unique Scale-Out Architecture Provides Investment Protection

ExaGrid’s award-winning scale-out architecture provides customers with a consistent backup window regardless of data growth. Its unique landing zone retains the most recent backup in its full undeduplicated form, enabling the fastest restores, offsite tape copies, and instant recoveries.

ExaGrid’s award-winning scale-out architecture provides customers with a fixed-length backup window regardless of data growth. Its unique disk-cache Landing Zone allows for the fastest backups and retains the most recent backup in its full undeduplicated form, enabling the fastest restores. ExaGrid’s appliance models can be mixed and matched into a single scale-out system allowing a full backup of up to 2.7PB with a combined ingest rate of 488TB/hr, in a single system. The appliances automatically join the scale-out system. Each appliance includes the appropriate amount of processor, memory, disk, and bandwidth for the data size. By adding compute with capacity, the backup window remains fixed in length as the data grows. Automatic load balancing across all repositories allows for full utilization of all appliances. Data is deduplicated into an offline repository, and additionally, data is globally deduplicated across all repositories.

This combination of capabilities in a turnkey appliance makes the ExaGrid system easy to install, manage, and scale. ExaGrid’s architecture provides lifetime value and investment protection that no other architecture can match.

ExaGrid and Veeam

Veeam’s backup solutions and ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage combine for the industry’s fastest backups, fastest restores, a scale-out storage system as data grows, and a strong ransomware recovery story – all at the lowest cost.

ExaGrid and Veritas Backup Exec

Veritas Backup Exec provides cost-effective, high-performance backup and recovery – including continuous data protection for Microsoft Exchange servers, Microsoft SQL servers, file servers, and workstations. High-performance agents and options provide fast, flexible, granular protection and scalable management of local and remote server backups. Organizations using Veritas Backup Exec can look to ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage for nightly backups. ExaGrid sits behind existing backup applications, such as Veritas Backup Exec, providing faster and more reliable backups and restores. In a network running Veritas Backup Exec, using ExaGrid is as easy as pointing existing backup jobs at a NAS share on the ExaGrid system. Backup jobs are sent directly from the backup application to ExaGrid for backup to disk.

About ExaGrid

ExaGrid provides Tiered Backup Storage with a unique disk-cache Landing Zone that enables fastest backups and restores, a Repository Tier that offers the lowest cost for long-term retention and enables ransomware recovery, and scale-out architecture which includes full appliances with up to 6PB full backup in a single system.

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